Last week I went to a seminar at The Tylock Eye Care and Laser Center to see about getting Lasik done since I’m extremely nearsighed. Today was the exam, which was quite thorough. It turns out that I am a candidate and they asked if I would like to volunteer to have my surgery done at one of the seminars. I said yes, and have it scheduled for the 12th of October. Updates to follow…

First light! I got the struts attached to the primary tube and clamped to the secondary cage. The moon was just about perfect and I spent about 20 minutes sliding the secondary cage up and down in order to get the eyepiece to come to focus. Then the holes got marked and I’m done for the night. Tomorrow I’ll drill the holes and paint the insides and outsides of the two tubes.

Well, this morning was my first VE session since becoming a W5YI VE. It was at the Don Pablos on 183, just west of Beltline and was held by the Irving Amateur Radio Club. We didn’t have anyone come to take an exam so it was more of a chat session, but was fun nonetheless. I’ll be back out there next month to help out again, so hopefully there’ll be a few examinees then!

I finally started putting together the 8″ f/4 dobsonian that I’ve been talking about building for a couple years now. One of our neighbors helped me cut the sonotube into two sections, one for the primary mirror cell and one for the secondary cage. Then I drilled and cut the holes for the mirror cell, spider, and focuser. They’ve all been temporarily mounted so that I can test the optics and get the final positions for the secondary cage. I’m using an open tube design that will be using six aluminum rails to support the two sections. I got the idea from http://www.usno.navy.mil/8inchdob.html. Next weekend I’ll finish putting together the OTA, build the base, and collimate the entire system.

We picked up a couple potties today because it’s about time to start potty training Reese. It’ll be nice to not have to change diapers, but it’s going to be interesting getting to that point. The good thing is that his daycare is also starting to have them sit on the potty, so he’s getting familiar with it already. Updates to follow…

So for the last few days I’ve been fighting a few sites that decided to put links to the bikerscum domains on their pages, one of which describes it as a porn site. It’s obviously not, and so after a little mod_rewrite work visitors coming in from there are going elsewhere.

If you’re going to link to me, fine. But let me know in advance if it’s got the potential to generate lots of traffic. Which, by the way was how I noticed this. It’s kind of funny to watch your traffic go up by a factor of 100.